During last night’s hour-long How To Win the Lottery broadcast, Brown who always says he gets his results using a combination of “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” took the chance to show other illusions inferring they had a bearing on the lottery trick.

But in the end all Brown revealed was that Wednesday’s illusion was just that -- a trick -- leaving viewers who felt shortchanged to complain bitterly on message boards.

“He insults our intelligence with this nonsense,” was one response.

“So what was the point of the hour of TV? To mock his audience?” was another. It added further fuel to the theory that Brown’s feat was the result of mere camera trick -- with split screen technology one of the most likely explanations put forward.

On the show he said he was partly inspired by a traditional “country fair” technique to accurately predict the result and suggested he had simply worked out the correct numbers by asking a group of 24 people to guess them.

He said he told the group to free their thoughts of winning and asked them to write down numbers for each of the six balls. He then added up all the numbers of the balls and divided the figures by 24 -- taking his inspiration from the Wisdom of Crowds Theory which argues that decisions made by many are better than those by individuals.

But some believe this, as well as the show, was just more Brown misdirection.